Modern servers contain both “system processors” and “service processors.” Management of server hardware is commonly performed by a management application running on either a server or servers (e.g., in a blade or partitioned server system) being managed or on a remote management station (another computer). The management application obtains its data from the service processor(s) that is part of the server(s) being managed. The communication channel used to obtain this data typically has high latency and low bandwidth. Current protocols and formats used for this data transfer are, however, very inefficient over such a channel, leading to long application response times. Further, current methods require significant processing on the service processor for each data request, which also increases the latency due to the service processor's limited processing power.
When the amount of information to be transferred is small or the data rate is low, current methods can give acceptable performance. But the trend for server management applications is to request increasingly more information at higher rates; the point has been reached where current data transfer methods create a performance bottleneck that leads to unacceptable application performance. This is particularly a problem in large, partitionable servers and blade systems.
One current method for data access to a service processor is IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface). IPMI uses a relatively efficient format for data transfer, but requires the application to perform schema accesses over the slow channel and requires the application to perform many accesses to obtain its required data. The processing of IPMI request on the service processor is relatively simple and efficient, but IPMI supports only a simple data model and a limited number of objects.
Another current method is WBEM (Web Based Enterprise Management). Originally designed to run on powerful computers and communicate over a fast data channel, it is being used on low performance service processors and slow communication channels. Besides having the schema access and multiple access limitations of IPMI, WBEM also uses a particularly inefficient data format and is complex, requiring significant memory and processing on the service processor to parse a request and form a response. WS-manage (Web Services for Management) is an emerging Microsoft method for obtaining management data with all of the disadvantages of WBEM.